1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image-capturing device and to an image combination program.
2. Description of Related Art
A technique is per se known of performing photography by dividing it into a plurality of successive exposures, and of then obtaining a single image by combining the image signals obtained each time (refer to Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2001-86398).
However, with this prior art technique, if the amounts of positional deviation between the successively captured images are too great, then it is not possible to match the positions between the images, so that it is not possible to combine the images. Due to this, it has been considered to select one of the images as a reference image and eliminate from the subjects for combination those images whose positions cannot be matched to this reference image, while using other ones of the images instead of those eliminated images. However in this case there is the possibility that, if the image used for reference is not appropriately selected, then the number of images that are eliminated from the subjects for combination may become large, and this is undesirable.
Moreover, there is also the problem that the result of using the same image for combination several times will be that, in the combined image, the gain component of some particular one of the constituent images may become too great, and this is also undesirable.